DXC Labs: Voice - and cloud-controlled drone

DXC Labs has created an experimental voice-activated (Amazon Alexa) and cloud-controlled (AWS IoT) drone that uses three-word identifiers from what3words to provide precise location directions to within three square meters, anywhere in the world. This means the drone operator (such as a first responder or maintenance worker) can easily give a voice command that will send the drone to a specific place on earth.

what3words has divided the world into 3-by-3-meter squares and assigned each square a unique identifier consisting of three words. For example, “public.warns.artist” identifies the location of the historic shipwreck of the HMVS Cerberus, south of Melbourne, Australia. Telling the drone “go to location: public warns artist” sends the drone there. Watch the video below to see how it works.

Getting to Hard-to-Reach Places

The what3words service allows user-friendly routing of the computer-controlled drone to locations that may not have a conventional street address, such as plant and equipment locations, a missing person in a national park, a fire in a large campus, or any location whose street address is inaccurate or ambiguous.

This greatly improves activities such as identifying disaster zone locations for first responders, inspecting power lines and oil rigs, making deliveries to hard-to-reach places, and traveling to any point in the world.

How might voice-activated devices and drones change your business?

DXC Labs is working with a number of digital transformation technologies, including drones, robotics, 3D printers, computer voice and vision, augmented and virtual reality, blockchain, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.